I was going to post about a bookmarklet and fractional horseposer webserver combination for all my picture uploading needs today, but it’s now more of a ‘works in Firefox’ than an ‘all my needs’ thing. Which is too bad, since I prefer Safari to Firefox right now.

I’m trying to modify my current uploading workflow from using both a web broswser (to select) and command line tool (to upload) to just using a web browser. Less typing, shiny javascript, all that. And a command line tool that’s also a webserver.

The Flow:

Open a page of images, with links to larger ones, which are just links to images, not to pages containing the image

Open the larger ones of interest in new tabs

Weed out.

Hit the post image bookmarklet, add a caption and submit.

The backend uploads a medium and large to my manila site, and the large one to flickr.

Firefox: Great. When you open a bare image, there is a DOM created with an image tag that does the right thing. The img src is correct, and the DOM can be modified to insert my form. The one minor drawback is that once I post to a server, I can’t get back to a flle:\// url.

In Safari, not so good. The image is actually opened with a different renderer than an html page, there’s a DOM but it’s just an html and body with no content and not modifiable. So tack two is to use the bookmarklet to get the document location, post that out, and get a form back from the local server that’s the equivalent of what I can insert via javascript.

Except.

More often than not, the location is about:blank, not the image url. There are cases where the image url is in the location, but not in a pattern that I’ve nailed down yet. It appears that it’s after some manipulation, reloads, or dragging an image from the desktop. Unfortunately, not when it’s just from an ‘open link in a new tab’ operation.

A webkit developer or two have said that they’ll probably fix the first issue, but in the meantime, I’m on Firefox.